Skepticism

EVENTS

Gotta respect editors

As a college professor, I am pleased to see a site that monitors and evaluates the accuracy of our work. I speak, of course, of Blackboards in Porn, the site that proofreads the blackboards in the background of porn movies set in classrooms. Somebody has to do it.

Hang on…porn set in classrooms? That is the most unrealistic, unromantic, libido-crushing environment ever. I know — I’m the guy who manages to drive sex completely out of the minds of 18 year olds every day in my job.

The stuff on the board in “Good Will Hunting” was pretty good and included what looked like a graph-theoretical adjacency matrix, if I recall correctly. I don’t know if this was carried over to the “Good Will Humping” porn version.

One of my students commented on how lucky I was to be teaching “a class full of cuties”. I pointed out to her that said “cuties” were more than two decades away from my age, and less than a decade older than my ten-year-old daughter. So I found them “cute” only in a paternalistic way.

I’m the guy who manages to drive sex completely out of the minds of 18 year olds every day in my job.

It seems to me that math teachers are much more successful at libido suppression than biology professors. Just saying.

Nevertheless, the extremely modest assumption that only 1% of the student population finds you sexually attractive ensures that (unless you have a very light teaching load) every school term it is more likely than not that someone in the classroom is lusting after you.

PZ, of course there’s classroom porn. Someone has to create the college prof/private school woman in a uniform with lesbian undertones and tentacle sex porn. :) Now I’ll never be able to look at any movie with a blackboard in the background without checking the accuracy of what’s on the blackboard.

I sense a replay of the Bachmann hotdog incident. It will be all witticism for 40-50 comments, then a skepchick will reprimand you because its “not funny” and its “rape apologist humor” and you and your baboons will turn 180 degrees in “independently minded” unison and start expressing your outrage in chorus. ssdd.

Uhuh. And you accidentally “found” this site too I bet. Anomalous result while searching for “redheaded geek girls in glasses nude”. Uhuh. Yeah. Uhuh.

Farce. FTB is the best laugh this side of beavis and butthead. Shame there are still kids out there not clued up enough to spot the Koolaid. That is the tragedy.

The bizzare thing is that I’ve always found myself checking out the blackboards in those scenes. I just can’t help it! Only after I’ve satisfied myself that it’s all bullshit can I shift my attention to the other attractions on display.

I find this highly suspicious. During any classes with well endowed teachers at that I age I was always thinking “History; but also tits.” or “Biology, yes, but tits.” or “Mathematics of course, but also tight fabric, and tits.”

This is clearly an extremely advanced level mathematical course, focusing on the Peano axioms for the natural numbers which formalised mathematics in the late 19th century. This course would culminate with Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem which shows that the consitency of the Peano axioms cannot be formalised within Peano arithmetic itself.

During any classes with well endowed teachers at that I age I was always thinking “History; but also tits.” or “Biology, yes, but tits.” or “Mathematics of course, but also tight fabric, and tits.”

Same (except substitute ass wherever you wrote tits) and I’m still very much stuck there, what with being that age and all. Fucked up part is most of the time I really don’t want to be. It’s just that, for some unknown reason, I feel like I should be thinking about how hot so-and-so is.

For example, I’ll be eating, look up, notice a woman, return to my meal and feel as if I’ve forgotten to look at her. Like there’s a checklist or something. It’s gotten much easier to ignore but it’s still there.

The stuff on the board in “Good Will Hunting” was pretty good and included what looked like a graph-theoretical adjacency matrix, if I recall correctly. I don’t know if this was carried over to the “Good Will Humping” porn version.

Meh. It would have been fine for an undergraduate discrete math course. As a problem that was supposed to stump a class of MIT graduate students, it was pretty pathetic.

It seems to me that math teachers are much more successful at libido suppression than biology professors. Just saying.

Very recently, I donated my eggs as an undergrad. Hyped up on hormones and other fun drugs to hyperstimulate my ovaries, I can assure you, no amount of math my modeling professor could throw at me made me forget his flowing locks and Russian accent. But in that state, I suppose I wasn’t exactly an ideal representative of the population.

I like to imagine that the Blackboards in Porn site was demanded and funded by frustrated members of the porn film industry. They were getting sick and tired of all the fan mail focused on nit-picking the math and grammar in porn films — and thus had to create a forum towards which they could safely steer their critics to keep them out of their hair (so to speak.)

Good for you! That’s a pretty generous thing to do, and I understand somewhat painful.

But the mental image of a 20-ish young woman with deliberately added hormones and drugs is a little … discomfitting. I hope you managed to keep yourself under enough control to avoid actually embarrassing yourself in public. At least when there were any cameras around. At least if they were in the hands of the sort of asshole that would post pictures.

And I hope life has returned to something like normality by now. If that’s good.

HOLLA: I think PZ’s focus is on destigmatizing sexuality and stickin’ it to the censoring prudes. Promoting the idea that bodies and sex and so forth are not “inappropriate” but rather a natural part of being human. Breaking up that sadistic societal forced gunpoint marriage between morality and sexuality. I think he’s just showing it’s no big deal.

“Care to back that claim up? I have been following this site for about two years and I have trouble believing it’s even once a month.”

Well, don’t know how many redundancies there are, but a simple google search reveals 2470 blog entries headlined with or including the word “porn.” Not claiming that the content of each blog entry is specifically porn-related. It’s sometimes used as an adjective; for instance, to describe squid sex.

However, there are certainly plenty of other adjectives that PZ could use – I propose that PZ uses it in a hamfisted (excuse the pun) attention to gain the admiration of his youthful, porn-addled audience.

Oh, and for a breakdown. Assuming a generous 5 posts per day over the 5 year run of the blog, that comes to roughly 9125 posts, of which 2470 have had some mention of porn. So I actually underestimated.

“HOLLA: I think PZ’s focus is on destigmatizing sexuality and stickin’ it to the censoring prudes. Promoting the idea that bodies and sex and so forth are not “inappropriate” but rather a natural part of being human. Breaking up that sadistic societal forced gunpoint marriage between morality and sexuality. I think he’s just showing it’s no big deal.”

All fine and dandy.

But porn does none of those things. It literally turn women’s bodies in pieces of capital. And the de-Christianized world is no stranger to nor guard against sadism. See, ahem, the Marquis de Sade.

Holla,
You have a curious way of making your point. First you should note that the post count is well over 10k for this blog, 12835 as of July 31, not that it alters things too much, but your averaging was unnecessary. Secondly, you claimed that PZ posts on porn once a week and then used a different metric and just gloss over the difference. Third, a lot of the content at this site is commenter generated so it is almost certain that some of those hits were based on a commenter using the term, whether talking about it or as a descriptor for something else, rather than PZ. If you want to make a point, handwaving about the statistics that back it up is not going to help.
Or do you think that PZ has had 2360, or one in six, posts about bitch too?

Well, don’t know how many redundancies there are, but a simple google search reveals 2470 blog entries headlined with or including the word “porn.” Not claiming that the content of each blog entry is specifically porn-related. It’s sometimes used as an adjective; for instance, to describe squid sex.

Dishonest fuckface. Many of the threads goes on for hundreds of comments and have topic drift. Many of those had nothing to do with even “squid sex” and some person will bring up porn of some sort. But, hey, any shit that your can pull out of your ass that “proves” that PZ has a porn obsession.

But porn does none of those things. It literally turn women’s bodies in pieces of capital

*Some* porn. Narrower brush here please.

My (limited, really, honest, Mr.PornMonitor Sir!) experience suggests to me that American porn tends to focus on the ‘meat’ aspect a bit too much for my tastes. Scandinavian porn is somewhat earnest and “oh it’s just some fucking”. French porn tends to be self-consciously arty – except for the worrying slapstick comedy parts. UK porn tends to the Benny Hill “oh look we’re having fun being naughty” theme with much less of the airbrushed teenager focus. German porn… I’m not going to go there if I can avoid it. Italian porn is so classy it could be broadcast on Channel4. Amateur porn is mostly “wheee look what we got up to” with a bit of that “Hey y’all, watch this” (which is, by the way, known to the State of California to be a dangerous substance). You can’t even say that all porn is aimed at sad old men or horny young boys because there is plenty of gay, lesbian-for-lesbians, and made-for-women material out there. A lot of normal people like sex. A lot of normal people like to watch depictions of sex.

I propose that PZ uses it in a hamfisted (excuse the pun) attention to gain the admiration of his youthful, porn-addled audience.

Youthful??? I suspect that the median age is at least in their 40’s.

Many of us have AARP cards, talk in wheezy voices, and chase the teenagers off our lawns by waving our canes. ;)

The internet is for porn

There’s porn on the internet? Reminds me of a West Wing comment by Pres. Bartlett when talking to the churchy types, who asked him if he was upset if porn could be had at the local newsstand for $5. He thought $5 was too much to pay for porn…

If I really wanted to draw in an audience, I’d show porn rather than mock the prevalence of porn on the internet. I’m sorry to say that if you have prurient motives, you won’t find much to satisfy your lusts on Pharyngula.

For his next trick, Holla will demonstrate that I’m a propagandist for religion by counting the frequency of god references in my posts.

I see that Franc Hoggle is still a regular reader of the blog, as “gorblimey”.
Sorry, Franc, the fantasy world in your head is not real.

Oh dear. Your paranoia is leaking. I guess you find comfort in promoting the nonsense that your bogeyman is an isolated maniac. Do you lose sleep over the fact that maybe he’s not and that other people can see the same patterns? Told you this thread would degenerate into another sex fear babblegasm and it has. Nothing ever changes here. And you, again, teeter on a fence trying to maintain alpha-ape status whilst simultaneously pandering to the wowser brigade and their fragile feelings.

I at least find comfort in the amount of time you spend slobbering about His Awfulness as far afield as Novella’s blog. This hoggle-monster doesn’t even have to do anything to get you jumping at shadows, doesn’t even need to show up. Is your conscience starting to play up Paul? For someone that is obviously as deranged loser as you imply, there hasn’t exactly been a whole lot of actual rebuttal beyond common insult slinging. Sorry, takes more than that to be convincing. At least outside of these walls.

PZ has posted about porn – at least in posts specifically titled to include such – less than 20 times, and sex less than 50 (on the old SB site). Obviously, there are going to be more posts than that, since he doesn’t say “PORN POST!” in the title of every post that references porn, but I think that those numbers are a far more accurate count than Holla’s silliness above.

And gorblimey, I’m confused. How has this turned out exactly as you said it would? You said, and I quote:

It will be all witticism for 40-50 comments, then a skepchick will reprimand you because its “not funny” and its “rape apologist humor” and you and your baboons will turn 180 degrees in “independently minded” unison and start expressing your outrage in chorus. [emphasis added]

I fail to see any 180’s occurring. In fact, everyone seems to be arguing against the one who “expressed outrage.”

Many of the threads goes on for hundreds of comments and have topic drift.

Never. The comments never drift away from the origional post.

And you realize many of the commentors here aren’t ‘youthful, porn-addled human beings,’ right?

Yeah! Some of us are middle aged!

Told you this thread would degenerate into another sex fear babblegasm and it has.

You do realize that Holla the Dishonest Assclam is the one decrying objectification in all porn and that we, the independently-minded baboons, are independently and individually mocking the homo sapiens who is ashamed and/or frightened of the idea of sexuality? Or are you just substituting a masturbatory backslap for something else?

My calculus professor is 5 years younger than me (returning student), and when he reaches up to the higher parts of the blackboard, his shirt pulls up so high his lower abdomen gets partially exposed. He’s cute. So, no, really, math does not kill the naughty thoughts.

Now I feel young at a mere 40. I’m also fairly addled, but porn had at best a peripheral influence on my attaining that state.

To actually address the topic, I was interested to note that mathematics was the most common topic on those blackboards reviewed so far (and pleased that marks were deducted for use of the barbaric “math”). I do tend to obsessively try to see if any maths in the background of my (now universally non-porn) viewing is correct – these things are almost always either simplistic or nonsensical (usually improperly formed jumbles of mathematical notation), and are barely ever merely wrong. There are a few notable well researched examples of correct higher level maths, but they are rare.